Fridays Are Reward Time

Well we made to another Friday. Personally I'm rooting for this catch phrase to stick Fridays Are Reward Time cause the acronym is F.A.R.T. and well thats funny. But really I think every Friday we should all set aside a little time to reflect on how the week went. For me and my family it was a great week. My wifes brother came up from Maryland and spent some time with his nieces and nephew. Lucky for him he had some extra time since we have gotten slammed with plenty of spring snow in the Poconos and the kids only had two and a half days of school this week. Monday we all went to dinner at Friendly's for the wifes Birthday.

                                                                                                                                                                                                              
We don't get out much as a family (thank you Mt. Airy Casino) so the experience was different to say the least. Lets just say we don't get out enough for the kids to use their special "Hey were out in PUBLIC manners", we got pretty lucky that we were seated by a friend that manages the place and he put us in what was essentially our own room in the restaurant. Of course, maybe it was not being seated near anyone that could of contributed to all the laughing, giggling and playing of the telephone game while eating dinner. Either way a great time was had by the birthday wife and all.

   We spent a lot of the week listening to people moan about the weather here in North East Pennsylvania. As if you lived in the north east part of the country and never saw snow in March. Duh its not as warm here as it is in Texas or Florida, thats why people who don't like the cold go to those places. If you want 90 degree weather in March move to Texas. Personally I am a huge lover of the 4 seasons in a year thing. Granted the winter can be grueling and it was not all that long ago I was writing about how sick I was of the cold and how I was bursting at the seems for Spring to arrive in the Poconos. Really though, were so close now whats another foot of snow gonna do, keep the kids in school till July , prevent me from raking those pesky - left over from Autumn - leaves just a little longer, maybe hold off the tomato garden a couple of weeks. Winter is really all about making lemonade out of lemons. Its an attitude thats says "Give me 12 inches of snow in March and I'll show you a 12 foot tall snowman". Made by 10 of the happiest kids, even though one is considered an adult, none of them had to go to school on Wednesday.

Finally, my new little nephew got the o.k. to head home from the hospital with his mama. Now it has been a decade since the wife and I brought home an infant. Thinking back to those days, I know how much work it is to have a wee one that you gotta feed every 3-4 hours and change the diapers and you get no sleep and everyone wants to see the baby and it feels so hectic at the beginning. You have to remember that family and friends, even when it sometimes feels inconvenient, are the cornerstone of a life.

So this weeks F.A.R.T. reminds us that our attitude is what makes things fun or miserable in life and that time spent laughing with family and friends is time well spent.  

MY KID IS NO BULLY

Think before you click. This is some brutal footage of a schoolyard bully getting his @#$ whooped.

deadspin.com

Ok if ur lookin for a teachable moment here it is! However you teach your boys not to bully, or how to deal with being bullied,  you may wanna watch this video with them. Thats right I watched this with my son and we had a great discussion about how each kid might of felt and why they were in this situation in the first place. He thought the little guy was pretty stupid for trying to pick on the big Cassey. My advice to my son when it comes to fighting has always been to use it as a last resort, but when you decide that is the road you have to go - then you go full force. I have always subscribed to the peace though strength adage, and have told Cave Boy if someone messes with him to hit them with a chair - kinda my version of shock and awe.
When I was in High School there was a friend of mine who was being picked on by a couple of older kids during gym class. Eventually he got so angry he bashed the back of their skulls with a hockey stick. That kid was never bothered for the next 4 years. Bullying is a hot topic in schools right now and I think that the bigger and stronger kids need to feel as though they are responsible for looking after the smaller kids. I try every day to make Cave Boy bigger ,stronger and more aggressive but not so he can pick on smaller and weaker kids. I want him to be a leader and I tell him all the time that he will grow up to do great things and to be a leader of people. 
Truth is that no one respects a bully, and men may obey a bully but they would never follow one.  I want my son and my nephews to be the next generation of great men, not a gang of hoodlums. A big part of my blog is about how we can mold our sons into the best people they can be, and if we want to do that we have to share the ugly side of human nature with them and explain whats wrong about that.

3-21-11

THE MONDAY MORNING MESS

The weekend was crazy eventful and exhausting. Saturday morning was our 4^th Eastburg Color Guard Tricky Tray of the season. Which means we were up at 6AM. The wife took command of what I like to call the Early Deployment, she was out of the house at 6:30 with the 3 girls, 1 got dropped at practice two went to the lab for blood work they needed to complete their yearly physicals, she dropped them at practice afterwards and came back up the mountain around 8 for the 2^nd assault. Team 2,Cave Boy, Grandpa, and the Boyfriend, and me as its leader, had been busy eating breakfast, cleaning up the kitchen and piling all the Tricky Tray supplies in the mud room. We all headed out right on time and were setting up at the High School by 8:45. The Tricky Tray was pretty successful the Parents Association raised about $700 and more importantly we saw a lot of support from friends and family.It was great to see Little Johnnie And Cass, Buggsy's gang, and my Sister, her husband and their 2 kids(who I will mention a lot, so we can call that group of family the C Clan). After the Tricky Tray the C Clan came back to our house.

The plan was that my girls would babysit their kids and we would go out for dinner for my Wifes birthday. My sister really wanted to go to this Steakhouse at the Mt. Airy casino and well who wouldn't want to try and win some money on their birthday. So we got there at 7 and our dinner reservations were not till 10.(thanks Bill for getting us a reservation at all). We had set aside $400 to bring with us. At 8 PM. we were down to a $140. I told my Wife that it was time to slow down or we were gonna run outta money. So we found my sister and her husband playing 3 card poker at table. My wife only ever plays slots. We sat and watched my Brother-in-Law rack up a healthy pile of chips, including a straight flush that pays out 40 to 1 ,and then my sister hit 3 of a kind which pays out at 30 to 1. So they spotted my wife a few chips and she hit triple 8's. By the time we left that table everyone was feeling happy. Then we sat down at another winning table to eat at Reds Steakhouse. The food at Reds was incredible a 22oz. porterhouse steaks some steamed broccoli a glass of red wine, onion soup, rolls with honey butter. My wife had the fillet with a red wine mushroom sauce that was out of this world. My wife then got the text that my brothers wife was headed to the birthing room to have her baby. Their 3 year old son was dropped off at our house and my 3 teenage daughters were now watching 3 kids under the age of 3. AWESOME JOB GIRLS! Cave Boy went to Grandpa's house

At about 11 PM.. I could be found in the middle of Mt. Airy casino, standing behind my wife screaming at a slot machine “KEEP GOING COME ON ONE MORE ...YES ONE MORE - YES ONE MORE – ONE MORE HAHAHA” She hit the jackpot $1501.00! She was so excited I thought she was gonna cry. People we didn't know came over to congratulate her. I ran to tell my sister. We have never won anything close to that much money. The rest of the night is a little fuzzy due to the amount of celebratory Jack and Cokes. We left the casino with $1600. My Sister-in-Law had a baby. We left cause my middle Daughter text me saying that my nephew, Headbutt, would not stop crying for his Daddy. When we got home I settled Headbutt down by explaining the situation to him. It went something like this:

Me – Headbutt knock it off. You dont need to cry like a little girl.

HB – I wanna go home!

Me – You cant Mommy and Daddy are at the hospital getting your brother out.

HB – Dont care I'm going to my house.

Me – Theres nobody at your house

HB – I go alone

Me – I'm not gonna let you be alone. Go to sleep.

HB – FINE!

In 3 minutes the kid was out cold. 5 minutes later so was I

Sunday Morning I got up just fine ,no headache, 8 AM. Go me. 2^nd fund raiser of the weekend would begin in 6 hours. I came upstairs to Headbutt bouncing up and down on the couch with my sisters 2 year old Mr Dinosaur. Though their own negotiation, my 3 girls decided that my middle daughter would stay home from the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade and help my wife with the preparations for the Lia Sophia Jewelery Party. We got the house cleaned up - the coffee brewing - my Brother stopped by to get Headbutt, who was now having so much fun he didn't want to go with his Dad, so that he could go meet his new brother, my brother-in-law and daughter started making meat balls and sausage for dinner - I ran to the supermarket to get drinks and paper towels, by the time I got back my In-Laws were here, then my Brother-in-Law ran to the supermarket to get cold cuts and bread. Then my wife's friend showed up with her husband and their 2 year old and all her jewelery stuff. My Aunt, my step father, my mother her 3 kids(I'll explain this one in a larger post), some of my wifes friends and a few neighbors...time to abandon house, we took the kids and ran across the street to my brothers house and his swing set.

Kids and a big yard and a swing set is about a perfect setting for me. I loved watching my girls and Cave Boy run around our yard when they were growing up. All the friends that have come over and thrown footballs and baseballs and water balloons and played tag – rode bikes...these are some of our best memories. So yesterday from that point of view was priceless. My 3 little sisters running around my brothers yard with basketballs, yelling look what I found Joe Joe, hide mine behind this rock and bury mine under these leaves and all the kids going down the slide and the feeling of family and friends all laughing under the sunshine of a warm spring day. Grandpa brought Cave Boy home and he ran over to play - the girls got back from the parade and they came over too. My brother, exhausted from not sleeping but excited from just having his 2^nd son, returned home from the hospital with Headbutt to get some rest. When he saw everyone playing in his yard he had to be thinking “just go home”, but he put little Headbutt down and started playing with everyone too. Hitting wiffel balls for all the little kids to chase. He let his dog out to run and all the kids screamed and tried to catch him. It was really a lot of fun. As the sun started to go down and the temperature got chilly Cave Boy and I were the last ones outside, throwing the football till dinner was ready. Almost everyone stayed for dinner. Camped out around the coffee table in our living room was my mom, aunt, wife, sister, and daughters. At the dinning room table my step father and 3 little sisters, my wifes jewelery friend, her husband and daughter. Standing in the kitchen my brother-in-law, my father, my son and me. By the time everyone left and we got cleaned up it was 10PM.  The good news is that we raised more than $1000 for guard in the last 2 days. The great news is that my wife and I now have enough money for our trip to Ohio at the begining of April and for our mini vacation to Wildwood NJ.at the end of April. My family has been blessed with a new member and everyone is healthy. What a week!

The latest Cave Kid

Dont just use all the brains you have....also use all you can borrow - Woodrow Wilson

     Well this entire entry is inspired by this quote I found at the last minute. See I have about a million ideas for content on this blog, my problem is that I'm still to new with the technology to figure out how to put my vision on the page. Not that I want all the readers to see everything thats going on in my head at any given moment in time,even if it were a snapshot it would be 1000 words to long. I think this whole blogging thing will get a lot better as I keep doing it. I don't know what the learning curve is on blogging with a high school diploma. I'm sure most college graduates, high school graduates,GED owners, high school drop outs and a few of those monkeys that NASA trains can type faster than I can. Most of them probably spend a lot less time pondering if they have dangling participial at the end of a sentence, and maybe a couple of the college graduates could explain to me what dangling participial means exactly.

     What I have learned over the last month is how much time you must invest in your blog. I have spent a ton of time on this lap top over the last month. I started by looking at blogs and reading a lot of articles online about blogging. Then after talking to my family I came up with the idea of sharing my relationship with my son with the world wide web. I have told my son that it doesn't matter if anyone ever reads these posts or not, he would have a valuable resource being able to look back at his childhood, and know what his father was thinking. Looking back at my blog so far I dont think he would learn to much.

     I have to be honest – I havent been able to be to honest yet. I have spent loads of time trying to figure out how to work twitter. Time figuring out how to set all these posts up and edit them and download photos. I feel like I have been writing junk so that I have content to mess with. That has to stop. Cause if its not a useful tool for my cave boy then whats the point. And is he really gonna care that the last sentence didnt have a “?” at the end, or that I started this sentence with And, I doubt it. I guess what Im saying is that I have to worry about substance over style, which is cool.

     For those of you who dont know I am unemployed. So for 2 months I have been getting up,getting the Cave Boy off to school, having a cup of coffee with the wife, and hitting the gym.(AKA our garage/Man Cave) for an hour, then I'm on the computer. Somedays I'm on all day. I'm reading blogs and researching things I wanna write about, and sporadically job hunting. I've found a ton of interesting people having some great conversations all over the world. Hat tip to The Mark Levin Show http://www.marklevinshow.com/, Pastor Kerry Mackey http://www.kerrymackey.com/, Pro active Dads http://proactivedads.com/, Father 411 http://www.father411.com/, and Play Ground Dads http://playgrounddad.com/ just to name a few.

     All these guys can make you think. Think about being a father, and having a good relationship with your son. What is it that you want your son to learn from you, what can you learn from him? What do you want to leave this world knowing your son will pass down to his sons? Deep soul searching questions that more fathers need to ask themselves. So for 2 months I've sat here trying to figure out the answers to all these questions – I go round and round on the answers – for days on end researching – thinking how I could write something profound.

     Last night I realized that the answers I'm looking for may come in a day or two ,or a year or two, or 10 years or 20 years. Truth is I dont know when I'll have the answers, maybe somethings were not supposed to know till after. Not everything I write is gonna be profound. Some posts may seem pointless to everyone except Cave Boy and Me – then again those would probably become our favorites.

     I dont know how some of these guys get all this stuff done. They have jobs and kids and a wife and they write these beautiful things – I'm unemployed and I cant find enough time to post once a week. I think I'm just gonna start firing out whatever I feel and maybe we can refine the stuff as we go along. I love reading all the different blogs and talking to all the different people but at some point I gotta get up and move around and stop reading and stop googling stuff.

     After all this whole thing is supposed to be about a guy spending time with his son – not a guy researching ways to spend time with his son. Cave Boy (CB) and I have been doing a ton of wrestling stuff – we have spent a bunch of time in the garage lifting weights over the last 2 weeks. My sister has been house hunting in our neighborhood for the last 6 weeks. She and her husband and their 2 sons (2yrs and 6months) have been at our house a lot. Its good for CB, he gets to play big brother to them. I have had 2 job interviews and am starting to feel like I will be going back to work sooner than later (knock on wood). So I'm gonna need some discipline of my own to keep a good work / life balance. 

     Course all this searching for things online have led to me developing a list of new things to buy. I have found boots, fishing poles, camping gear, wrestling singlets, resistance bands, pull-up bars all kinds of stuff. I have even been thinking about doing some father and son PX-90 over the summer. This is where the job thing could come in really handy. Darn 6 lottery numbers never sounded hard to pick - I hate being broke.

The Anticipation of Mud Pies

It has been a very cold and snowy winter here in the Pocono Mountains. Right about this time of year we all get the winter blues, cabin fever or just a plain old itch to get outside. Well I am happy to report that we will get some relief from old man winter here this week. The next few days we will see temperatures rise up to 60 degrees. There has been a blanket of that white stuff called snow, 8 to 12 inches deep, on my front lawn since the beginning of the new year. At the start of February the snow gave way to back to back sleet storms. The storms left a thick shell of smooth slick ice that has befuddled my poor dogs for the last two weeks. They slip slide and scurry along the surface like something out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Every once and a while they might find a weakness in the shell and suddenly drop 6 to 8 inches and then look at me as though I had sprung open a trap door.

My kids have enjoyed all of the winter seasons splendor this year from snow tubbing, skating, snowman building, snow ball fighting, igloo building, sledding snow angels, icicles, the beauty of seeing the snow on the trees, teasing each other about eating yellow snow, hoping for school closings, delayed openings, taking their little cousins outside, and coming back inside to a warm fire and a hot cup of cocoa, you name it they have done it, and now they want spring.

By Friday the ground here will start to thaw and all but the hardest snow packs will have melted away. This will start my yearning for one of my favorite times of the year... MUD PIE SEASON!!! I have a lifetime love affair with the mud pie time of year. There are plenty of times in the Summer and Autumn where it rains and nature gives us plenty of opportunities to mess around in the mud. But there is no time, as great as the first warm days of spring, after a long winter to get outside and muck around in the mud.



If your kids are bike riding age then you can put them outside and they will be dirty before they know it. If you have younger cave boys they may take some coaxing to get all dirty since their moms have probably been telling them to stay clean their whole lives. My wife is pro-kids-outside but she is very anti-mud-inside. We have a front foyer in our house that is affectionately called the MUD ROOM, where we kick off our dirty shoes and hang up coats and sometimes have to shed pants in an effort to not track mud all though the house. In warmer temps you can feel free to spray your kids down with a garden hose and let them dry in the sun. The important thing is to have fun.

Fun starts with the traditional mud pie, or as I like to call it, Nature's Play Dough. There really isn't an older form of sculpture than making things outta mud. You can bring out your cave boys artistic ability and his imagination just by saying build me a mud car. For some cave boys you might have to be more active, like throwing a ball into some mud and letting dive on it like its an NFL fumble. I know where I grew up, the kids in my neighborhood loved to play football, soccer, kickball even tag if it meant we got to go outside and play on the sloppy field in the park across the street from my childhood home. If you have a super playful little Bam-Bam and a lot of perfect mud then you can try the Woodstock Woosh. The W.W.1 is a tribute to those rabble-rousing  60's kids who were not only lovers of music, but also of mud. They can be seen in the old Woodstock footage sliding down hills of gushy brown mud in their underwear. HINT DADS: Only try the woosh in really warm weather.

One thing is for sure, you won't need a tour guide or your credit card or a fancy spa for your backyard mud bath. We just need the end of winter and the gradual warming temperatures of spring time. I know its only February, but here in the Poconos were ready for natures rebirth  We are ready for pitchers and catchers to report, ice to melt, flowers to bud, birds to come home, and ground to soften.We love living where there are 4 seasons to our year but, boy sometimes I wish I could decide how long each one lasted.

Happy Spelunking
The Caveman

   

Aggression Part of the Human Repertoire

Aggression Has Become a Label

"Calling boys 'aggressive' is an attempt to punitively try and control behavior we are not comfortable with. We rarely use this word in a positive way, so when we start by calling boys' behavior 'aggressive' we are already prejudicing how we look at it. Children use their bodies and express their feelings by pushing, grabbing, and fighting. This is age-appropriate for young children — they are in the motor stage of development. Teachers and parents need to help children find ways to resolve these conflicts. But the problem isn't that boys have these impulses and interests; the problem is that we over-react."

Joseph Tobin, Ph.D. Professor of Early Childhood Education, Arizona State University

What does it mean to be aggressive?

According to Webster's Dictionary, aggression is "a forceful action… the process of making attacks… hostile, injurious, behavior… caused by frustration." Real life boy examples include physical fighting, name-calling, and rough-housing that results in injury. Aggression is part of the human repertoire. "All human beings have the ability to protect themselves and attack others when in danger," explains Michael Thompson PhD.

Only a small percentage of boys' behavior is truly aggressive. While "all boys have normal aggressive impulses which they learn to control, only a small percentage are overly aggressive and have chronic difficulty controlling those impulses," says Michael Thompson, Ph.D. These are the boys who truly confuse fantasy with reality, and frequently hit, punch, and bully other kids. They have a lack of impulse control and cannot stop themselves from acting out. "They cannot contain their anger and have little control over their physical behavior and this is when intervention by parent or teacher is needed," says Thompson.

What Does This Mean To Me?

Well it means that I knew as much as 2 guys with PhD’s and I only graduated High School.  As any Dad knows, your son is gonna get into a fight sooner or later. Whether it’s on the playground with a school yard bully or his big sister is picking on him it’s gonna happen.  I think the trick is letting your caveboy So know when aggression is an appropriate response.  I also feel that we should show our sons how best to use this aggression when needed.  Teaching the caveboys not to be over aggressive in situations also goes a long way to instilling the confidence that they need for making good decisions.

Happy Spelunking,

The Caveman

P.S.  HAHA  Told ya I could report facts to cavemen  :P